Spilt Milk

As Dzine forays into the wonderful world of ceramics (check out pics of our ‘Anillo’ series designed by Victor Carrasco at www.facebook.com/Dzinestore), we are more and more inspired by the beauty of this living material.

Here are a few broken pieces that there is no point in crying over:

Combining porcelain and a local Israeli clay, Schlomit Bauman ‘double-cast’ pots and everyday objects and then sat back and watched the different shrinkage rates battle it out to create the ‘Ran-out’ collection.

Reiko Kaneko’s double heritage is apparent in this beautifully imperfect tea set. Indeed, the ‘Drip Tease’ collection is British teatime meets Japanese Wabi-sabi, and certainly makes spilling a whole lot more glamorous.

Drawing a deeper connection between old ladies and their ceramic objects, Tamsin Van Essen shows the beauty in disease in her ‘Medical Heirlooms’ series. Pots with rashes, third degree burns, eczema and other painful looking ailments populate this collection, which looks like it should come wrapped in gauze.

Xiaoli Wen used a silicone-sealed plaster cast system to mold discarded bottles, which are reshaped by being plunged into a waterfall while still curing and then used as a positive to create a mold.

The result is water’s revenge on the containers that shaped it for so long, in the form of a collection of distorted porcelain bottles.  

Another tea set, this time created by making molds from fabric prototypes.

Alice, by Rachel Boxnboim, has the soft but sharp characteristics Andre Breton dialogue:

Paul: “I love you”

Valentine: “A cloud of milk in a cup of tea”

Although they look a bit like they were burnt in the oven like a batch of cookies, these vessels by Fumiaki Goto are fired partly submerged in charcoal which turns the pointy bit (deprived of oxygen) into a pencil lead. 

Crudely carving bowls and mugs out of a lump of plaster, Max Lamb created a crockery collection, slip-cast by Staffordshire ceramics company 1882 Ltd. (check out photos of the factory in the second printed issue of ‘Handful of Salt’). Perfect for the modern-day Betty Rubble! 

Inspired by the story of a Tea set left in ruins which started to grow flowers after birds dropped seeds inside, ‘100 years after the party’ by Makiko Nakamura tells the tale of ceramics which become more beautiful after breaking and sprouting new life.

by Claire Toussaint